Cáceres was a vocal and brave indigenous leader, an opponent of the 2009 Honduran coup that Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, made possible. In The Nation, Dana Frank and I covered that coup as it unfolded. Later, as Clinton’s emails were released, others, such as Robert Naiman, Mark Weisbrot, and Alex Main, revealed the central role she played in undercutting Manuel Zelaya, the deposed president, and undercutting the opposition movement demanding his restoration. In so doing, Clinton allied with the worst sectors of Honduran society.

Despite the fact that he was a rural patriarch, Zelaya as president was remarkably supportive of “intersectionality” (that is, a left politics not reducible to class or political economy): He tried to make the morning-after pill legal. (After Zelaya’s ouster, Honduras’s coup congress—the one legitimated by Hillary Clinton—passed an “absolute ban on emergency contraception,” criminalizing “the sale, distribution, and use of the ‘morning-after pill’—imposing punishment for offenders equal to that of obtaining or performing an abortion, which in Honduras is completely restricted.”) He supported gay and transgender rights. (Read this. Among the first to be murdered was Vicky Hernandez Castillo, a transgendered activist in San Pedro Sula. Hernandez left her home on the night of the coup, apparently unaware that the new government had decreed a curfew. She was found dead the next morning, shot in the eye and strangled; Sentidog, an LGBT monitoring group, writes that 168 LGBT people were killed in Honduras between the coup and 2014.) Zelaya apologized for a policy of “social cleansing”—that is, the murder and disappearance of street children and gang members—executed by his predecessors. And he backed rural peasant and indigenous movements, such as the one Cáceres led, in the fight against land dispossession, mining, and biofuels. Zelaya, as president, was by no means perfect. But he was slowly trying to use the power of the state on behalf of the best people in Honduras, including Berta Cáceres.

Such is the nature of the “unity government” Clinton helped institutionalize. In her book, Hard Choices, Clinton holds up her Honduran settlement as a proud example of her trademark clear-eyed, “pragmatic” foreign policy approach.

Berta Cáceres gave her life to fight that government. She was the general coordinator of the COPINH (Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras), a group that has had many of its leadership murdered in the last few years. Last year, Cáceres was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize for her work opposing a major dam project:

Since the 2009 coup, Honduras has witnessed an explosive growth in environmentally destructive megaprojects that would displace indigenous communities. Almost 30 percent of the country’s land was earmarked for mining concessions, creating a demand for cheap energy to power future mining operations. To meet this need, the government approved hundreds of dam projects around the country, privatizing rivers, land, and uprooting communities. Among them was the Agua Zarca Dam, a joint project of Honduran company Desarrollos Energéticos SA (DESA) and Chinese state-owned Sinohydro, the world’s largest dam developer. Agua Zarca, slated for construction on the sacred Gualcarque River, was pushed through without consulting the indigenous Lenca people—a violation of international treaties governing indigenous peoples’ rights. The dam would cut off the supply of water, food and medicine for hundreds of Lenca people and violate their right to sustainably manage and live off their land.

Berta Cáceres, a Lenca woman, grew up during the violence that swept through Central America in the 1980s. Her mother, a midwife and social activist, took in and cared for refugees from El Salvador, teaching her young children the value of standing up for disenfranchised people. Cáceres grew up to become a student activist and in 1993, she co-founded the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) to address the growing threats posed to Lenca communities by illegal logging, fight for their territorial rights and improve their livelihoods. In 2006, community members from Rio Blanco came to COPINH asking for help. They had witnessed an influx of machinery and construction equipment coming into their town. They had no idea what the construction was for or who was behind the project. What they knew was that an aggression against the river—a place of spiritual importance to the Lenca people—was an act against the community, its free will, and its autonomy.

The names of Cáceres’s murderers are yet unknown. But we know who killed her.

According to one email circulating about her death: “Berta Cáceres and COPINH have been accompanying various land struggles throughout western Honduras. In the last few weeks, violence and repression towards Berta, COPINH, and the communities they support had escalated. In Rio Blanco on February 20th, Berta, COPINH, and the community of Rio Blanco faced threats and repression as they carried out a peaceful action to protect the River Gualcarque against the construction of a hydroelectric dam by the internationally financed Honduran company DESA. As a result of COPINH’s work supporting the Rio Blanco struggle, Berta had received countless threats against her life and was granted precautionary measures by the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights. On February 25th, another Lenca community supported by COPINH in Guise, Intibuca, was violently evicted and destroyed.”

I’m tempted to end this post with a call on Bernie bros and sisters to hold Hillary Clinton responsible and to ask, when possible in town halls and meet and greets, if she ever met Cáceres, or if she is still proud of the hell she helped routinize in Honduras. But, really, Cáceres’s assassination shouldn’t be reduced to the idiocy of American electoral politics.

"We reject the patriarchal victimization that the Honduran state and the states in the region want to impose on us. We, the women and the people, reject it, together, brothers and sisters. We reject it because we are criminalized women, who are also living under death threats for shattering this power imposed by neoliberalism in our territories."
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/18/slain_activist_berta_caceras_daughter_us

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James O'donnell Iiisays:

March 5, 2016 at 3:24 am

Nearing 50, I have spent my entire adult life watching America's brazen corruption by oligarchs who unambiguously despise democracy, at home and abroad. I have spent the last two decades supporting activism and working as an artist and writer to resist my country's sickening lurch to the right, which has been led, frankly, not just by the Bushes but by a cadre of "Democrats" like the Clintons (the folks who "triangulated" the Party of FDR into extinction)... and which made the emergence of a Trump-like figure a political inevitability in America (with demagogue-ing Democrats like the Clintons, there's not enough room to the right of them for anything BUT a Trump!).

I don't think it is reductive or "idiocy" -- a matter of petty domestic politics -- to point out that Sen. Bernie Sanders is one of the few remaining American politicians who has resisted the neo-fascist establishment that's overtaken our institutions. His candidacy represents about the only hope any informed, sane American can have... and the POLLS keep showing him outperforming Sec. Clinton and beating all likely GOP rivals in November. (And that’s why I'm saying “BERNIE or BUST!” It’s only the republic, middle class, and rule of law at stake, folks... and probably the Earth’s ecosystem -- nothing to "triangulate" about.)

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Randall S Andrewssays:

March 4, 2016 at 3:16 pm

I don’t want to make any suggestion that Clinton is not responsible for her participation in this problem. But come election day, if she is the Democratic nominee, I will bite the bullet and vote for her because, whatever her shortcomings and misdeeds, unless the heavens open up and swallow the remaining Republican candidates (with the possible exception of John Kasich,) she will be, at least, the lesser of evils.
Even so, America’s pervasive malignancy of disrespect for, and subhuman treatment of indigenous peoples, brown and black peoples, women, queer peoples and our neighbors to the south will remain. Clinton did not start this disease; she is only the latest symptom of it. Rather than laying all the blame at her feet, we need to look in the mirror and make a collective mea culpa.
Over 50 times since 1890 the US has used military “intervention” (and/or “command operations”) to impress its will on Spanish-speaking people to its south. But we can go back further. Even among the founders the notion of the annexation of Cuba was floated.
Nor do we need to look outside our borders to see that we have had this cancer since the very beginning. Europeans came with their African slaves and (euphemistically) “displaced” the indigenous peoples. And there basically isn’t any group (including the Dutch, French, Spanish and the Germans, who were here from the start, some of them earlier than the English) that we haven’t excluded from “America” at some point or another.
It is easy to heap abuse on Clinton. The harder part is to make the US “that shining city on the hill” we fancy ourselves to be. The real work will be with us for a long time, regardless of the outcome of this election. And the real burden lies with the American people; we only delude ourselves to think that politicians will (or can) do anything.

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Dianne Kocersays:

March 4, 2016 at 12:55 pm

Kill street children like sick dogs but ban the morning after pill and abortion. As usual the right wing, regardless of where they are in the world, spout moral pronouncements while promulgating murder and corruption. Perkins book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, details how long we've been at this ruthless domination of Latin America through one administration after the other. Our country should hang its head in collective shame.

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Edward M Protassays:

March 4, 2016 at 12:39 am

Henry Kissinger would be proud of his admiring protege, Hillary Clinton.

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600120729says:

March 3, 2016 at 6:23 pm

I have a question, but it's not for Hillary Clinton because she's a liar with no moral scruples, so I have no interest in what she has to say for herself. We all know she'd make excuses, lie through her teeth and deflect to someone else.

No, my question is for Joan Walsh and is a simple one.

Thoughts, Joan?

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Rene Sallersays:

March 3, 2016 at 6:09 pm

Thank you for writing this. I wish it would make a difference, but unfortunately I fear that Katha Pollitt and other leftish HRC supporters are already so firmly entrenched in their beliefs about the superiority of their candidate over Senator Sanders that they will dismiss all questions about Secretary Clinton's reckless and inhumane foreign policy decision as sexist and unfair. It troubles me that so many of HRC's supporters gloss over her neocon and neoliberal ideology.

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Edward M Protassays:

March 4, 2016 at 12:40 am

Don't lose heart. As Yogi said, "It ain't over 'till it's over."

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Alycee Lanesays:

March 3, 2016 at 5:11 pm

So, this is what having a mentor like Kissinger looks like.

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Barbara Winslowsays:

March 3, 2016 at 4:04 pm

Isn't Obama the US President? Isn't Kerry now the Secretary of State. Of course Clinton is shamefully and murderously implicated. Is she the ONLY Democrat?

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Brian Michelsays:

March 3, 2016 at 5:25 pm

As the article states, the environment which created this murder was hoisted upon Honduras by the decisions of Clinton when she was SoS. Your comment is like saying that Bush shouldn't be blamed for the rise of ISIS because Obama is president now. Well, when creating the conditions THEN create the circumstances which make NOW happen, then you point the finger at those responsible for making those conditions happen in the first place. In this case, it was the Clinton-backed coup of a Latin American leftist government, something to which our nation seems to be homicidally allergic.

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Barbara Winslowsays:

March 3, 2016 at 5:57 pm

Clinton is responsible. But she also worked for President Obama, who is also responsible. And yes, she should be called out for this murder. She did not back this coup, or any other coup, without Obama's go ahead.

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Malcolm Smithsays:

March 18, 2016 at 1:59 pm

We are objecting to the entire neoliberal, neocon platform of the modern Democratic Party as a whole. They are all responsible.

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Dylan Jerrellsays:

March 3, 2016 at 5:20 pm

She's the only democrat running for the party's presidential nomination that's morally responsible for the atrocities.

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Charlotte E Edwardssays:

March 3, 2016 at 3:52 pm

Bingo! 'We' need to get out of the business of running other nations - at least til we can rationally run our own.